Imaging & Document Solutions - Bright Ideas: The Three 'Cs' of Customer Care; Specialized Fonts

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The Three "Cs" of Customer Care

A Guide to Building Better Communications

How would you describe today's consumer? Harried? Finicky? Price conscious? All of the above? So, how can you court this individual? Romantics have known the answer to this question for centuries - shower the person with your undivided attention. If done well, statements, correspondence and even monthly bills can demonstrate your commitment to the relationship. Here are three considerations when crafting communications that will captivate your customers and ensure long, rewarding relationships.

1. Clarity. In focus groups, consumers have said they want to glance over their bill or statement and immediately grasp key information, such as "How much do I owe?" or "How have my funds performed over the last reporting period?" Designers can vary the weight of the font, use color effectively, and include dynamic charts and graphs to communicate information quickly. Thus pertinent details stand out and get noticed. Use focus groups for feedback.

2. Content. Every customer document has a primary purpose: Statements inform consumers of their account status, and bills advise customers how much they owe and request payment. But there is also an implied purpose. For instance, the underlying purpose of a mutual fund statement is to ensure that the investor remains confident in the fund, even when the market takes a downturn.

Most securities and brokerage houses have consumers fill out investment profiles when they open an account. Imagine how information such as age, investment goals and risk sensitivity can drive personalized communications. The average mom-and-pop investor would feel as if they had a financial advisor whispering in their ear every time they opened a statement. If you were getting that level of attention from your brokerage or mutual fund company, would you ever entertain calls from rival brokers?

3. Care. Customer relationship management initiatives typically transform companies into customer-centric organizations. Every functional area - marketing, sales, customer service - can view previous customer interactions and customer preferences.

Data mining tools help service organizations create customer profiles. Customer documents are an easy way to put this intelligence into action. For example, provide full-color statements to high-value customers (and those with potential). Offer to present the documents in the customer's native language. Offer to print documents in large type for the visually impaired. From a technology and operational standpoint, these preferences are easy to accommodate. Do so, and you'll earn a customer's loyalty and affection - one document at a time.

Ann Jurczyk is director of marketing, Doc1 Division, of Group 1 Software, Lanham, MD, www.g1.com

Specialized Fonts

OCR-A, OCR-B and MICR

When machine reading of print was first introduced in the 1960s, a highly stylized font known as OCR-A was created to optimize recognition. OCR-A was mostly limited to numeric characters and was not easy to read, so a new font, OCR-B, was developed to make the characters clearer and to extend the character set. The magnetic ink character (MICR) font used on checks, E13B, is a similarly stylized font. The fonts have fixed sizes and widths between characters. Why are these fonts still of interest and how should they be handled?

1. Examine. You will still find the fonts mentioned above in use in many financial transaction applications because they yield excellent results, but they do not read well with an untrained omnifont (variable font) OCR program. When considering OCR engines, carefully examine a representative set of documents to see if highly stylized fonts are present.

2. Seek. Look for a pattern-based OCR engine that includes the character sets specifically trained to recognize the fonts. The superior OCR results justify the extra effort.

3. Recognize. Many variable-font OCR engines have limitations and will not work well for the fonts mentioned here because they have been designed to read multiple sizes and fonts. These engines use characteristic matching techniques. Rather than matching the exact pattern of a character, they look for common characteristics. Omnifont OCR can read many different fonts extremely accurately, but it may have trouble reading special stylized, dot matrix and computer display fonts.

Dan Borrey is vice president, sales and marketing, of Vision Shape, Placentia, CA, www.visionshape.com